What is up with this shuttering. (Off-Topic)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Sunday, December 29, 2013, 07:53 (3774 days ago) @ uberfoop

So, I just saw the second Hobbit film. Significantly better than the first, and quite good as a whole. Much less in the way of stupidly overblown action scenes.

Huh, I find that comparison surprising. The first Hobbit had a quick troll fight and an Orc chase added to move things along in some slow parts, but other than the spiders, all of Desolation's action sequences are new additions.

Like the first, very loose port of the book. That still disappoints me a little, but trying to capture the book's character narrative and overall feel in a film would probably be rather difficult, to say the least.

I actually feel that the same type of adaption techniques used in LOTR are being used in The Hobbit: expanded action, peril, and larger love interests & female roles. Most of which all makes sense in the film medium to me. I actually think straight adaptions tend to be the worst kind of book-movie. Just because you hit the checklist of what occurred doesn't mean you captured the real spirit in a different medium with different strengths and weaknesses. If I want to experience a book exactly, I'll read it; if I see that same story in a different medium by different creators, I'm ready for a completely different approach to capture the inherit ideas and moods. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner are almost completely different stories yet some how collide together on the same notions, moods, and emotions, with the audience getting two separate experiences out if it. I always bring up those two for some reason. :)

That said, I think the Hobbit has been a much stricter adaption than LOTR. Every notable character and sequence so far has been featured on the screen or in the extended edition, whereas in LOTR we lost the "fifth hobbit", Tom Bambidil, the Barrow Downs, Glorfindel, Prince Imrahil, Bereground, and the Scouring of the Shire to name a few. With the inclusion of more of the songs from the books and all the fun Appendices side-stories, these last two films have actually felt more entrenched in Middle-Earth history in some ways, and enriches the whole film saga for me.

More technically, the shuttering is bothering me. It feels like there is way, way too much motion blur for the camera work. Or maybe there's not quite enough and my eyes aren't tracking the screen correctly. Or something, I don't know. It felt like that when I watched the first in 3D/48fps, and it felt that way today when I watched the second in plain old 2D/24fps.

Never noticed any of this in the Hobbit specifically, but I notice what you describe in pretty much all movies when the camera takes a slow pan over a detailed scene. Just too much data and not enough frames to make it smooth in our brains, is my thinking.